Up and running

Jerusalemites Shoshana Ben-David and Israel Haas try to bring together young people from across the city through sports and dialogue.

By NAAMA BARAK
Part of the group getting ready for a run. (photo credit: ITAI AKIROV)
Part of the group getting ready for a run.
(photo credit: ITAI AKIROV)
Running is usually considered a solitary sport, but it has recently brought together an unlikely mix of young Jewish, Armenian and Arab girls from across the capital, who through the activity are getting to see that people on the other side really aren’t very different after all.
“In running, it doesn’t matter where you come from,” says Shoshana Ben-David, one of the co-founders of Running Without Borders, a group that tries to get young Jerusalemites from different sectors of the city together through sports. “When you’re on the running track, everybody’s equal.”
Ben-David, 18, is a senior high-school student from the capital. An enthusiastic runner, she decided following last summer’s Operation Protective Edge and the tension and violence in Jerusalem to do something about the state of relations between young women from different backgrounds.
“I just saw a lot of potential for the future. A lot of girls want this, to learn and broaden their horizons,” she says.
She approached the Ginot Ha’ir Community Council’s activism center for support and was put in touch with Israel Haas, a 35-year-old entrepreneur – and a keen runner himself – who was thinking of setting up a similar group for boys. The two then founded Running Without Borders and have recently completed a crowd-funding campaign. The objective of the group is twofold: “To encourage sports among young women and to create a connection between groups that wouldn’t have met otherwise,” says Ben-David.
At present, there is a young women’s running group comprised of 16 girls aged 15 to 19, with an “almost equal balance between Jews, Arabs and Armenians,” she notes.
The group meets for a weekly running training session (in English) with a professional coach and holds dialogue meetings once every two weeks to get to know each other better and discuss a range of topics, from education to religion and family. Politics, of course, also finds its way into the discussion.
Ben-David and Haas are quick to point out, however, that the organization is not political.
“We separate politics on purpose,” Haas says. “Once you place yourself within a [political] organization… you’ve had it.” He adds that the group has turned down offers to be affiliated with political organizations. “We’re everybody’s, for everybody.”
The group has received financial support from private donors through the crowd-funding campaign. About a quarter of the donors are from Jerusalem, and some 10 percent are from the US. It has also received support from Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, as well as from some surprising sources.
“A few weeks ago I received a phone call from a pharmacist in Nazareth,” says Ben-David. He told her that he had heard of the group and was looking for six Jewish and Arab girls to run in the Milan Marathon in April. “I was very, very surprised,” she says.
A boys’ running group is also in the pipeline. There is currently a group of 10 junior high school boys, but their training is set to begin in a few weeks. At the moment, Ben-David and Haas are focusing on the fund-raising and the Jerusalem Marathon. Most of the girls are set to run between 5 km. and 10 km., and Ben-David plans to run the half-marathon.
But setting up the group wasn’t without difficulties.
First of all, Ben-David and Haas had to find participants.
While this didn’t prove to be much of a problem in Jewish neighborhoods, the Armenian community or the affluent Arab neighborhoods such as Beit Safafa and Beit Hanina, girls and parents in traditionally more hostile places such as Isawiya needed more convincing.
“I’m also trying with Jebl Mukaber and more difficult areas,” says Ben-David.
Overcoming social conventions is also a challenge.
Having girls run in a marathon, for example, is not something that “more religiously traditional [Arab] families” are totally comfortable with, says Ben-David. “A mom came to see the first training session in Beit Safafa,” she recalls.
THE COEXISTENCE aspect of the program is also hard to sell at times.
“You need to market it with very specific wording,” she says. “It’s also difficult for moderates inside their society,” she adds. “That’s why we also really want to strengthen the moderates among them.”
A way of doing so is finding someone in each community “who is integrative, a figure that emanates authority,” Haas says, such as educational figures.
Getting the girls to the training sessions is another problem.
“You won’t go anywhere near the [light-rail] train if you’re a 16-year-old Palestinian girl,” says Haas.
Ben-David agrees. “The parents don’t allow it,” she says, following attacks against Arabs over the summer.
To solve the problem, private transportation will be provided once the group becomes a registered NGO by mid-April and funds are allocated to it.
Reactions were also problematic at times.
“There are comments [like] ‘Oh, you run with Arabs,’” says Ben-David. On the other hand, she stresses, her schoolmates often surprise her with their support for her project, and people “ask if they can join and how they can help.”
It seems the group’s successes outweigh the original difficulties.
“Like anything being set up, there are initial difficulties in growing,” says Haas.
Getting people involved, for example, is no longer a big issue.
“People are already really enthusiastic and waiting to see what the next step will be,” he says.
Allowing room for different opinions was another goal.
“This is the place to do it in a civilized manner, without fights and friction,” says Ben-David.
She wants the girls to understand the idea that “there is another opinion here, which I don’t have to agree with, but I need to respect it, to be aware of it.”
The sports aspect of the group is just as important.
“There’s a girl who came and really wanted to get in shape. I saw that it was very difficult for her,” says Ben- David, adding that the girl comes to every training session.
The results are already apparent.
“The girls have started pulling themselves together,” she says.
As for being an 18-year-old entrepreneur, Ben-David seems to have it under control.
“I’m happy to do it,” she says. “I’m still keeping up good grades,” she adds. “You try to combine it with friends, with school.”
She credits her previous participation in the youth leadership development program LEAD and in a coexistence summer camp as helping her prepare for the job, although this is by far the biggest project she has undertaken.
“I’ve always been on student councils and stuff like that, but never something this big,” she says.
She is very pleased with the results and the girls’ relationships with one another.
“Overall, you find out that we’re very similar,” she says.
Through sports and dialogue, the participants can realize that an Arab, Armenian or Jewish young woman is “a girl just like me.”
Ben-David and Haas hope that their group is only the beginning of a much more expansive project. Their goal, they say, “is to try to develop this into a very large network that could accommodate more activity” that will help bring about the notion of coexistence to a wider audience.